How to Find Villages in Minecraft

In Minecraft, finding inhabited locations—villages, castles, temples... is very important. These places matter because they’re where you can trade, which is essential if you plan on surviving the nights. Or the creepers. Or the spiders. Or... well, pretty much anything.

Before explaining how to find inhabited locations, there are two things you need to bear in mind. Otherwise, you might end up wandering around like an idiot when it’s actually impossible for you to find any:

• You must enable Generate Structures in the options before starting a game in Survival Mode. Otherwise, no inhabited locations will appear in the biome.
• Remember that not every type of biome can be inhabited. You’ll only find people in taiga, plains, savanna, and desert biomes.
• The larger the biome, the better the chances of finding inhabited locations (although their appearance is still random unless you use an existing seed).

All set? Then let’s go looking for places with traders.

How to find villages, temples, and castles in Minecraft

Now that you’ve made sure the biome you’re exploring CAN contain villages—which doesn’t mean it definitely does—as well as temples or castles, we’ll explain how to find them. Broadly speaking, these are your options:

• Exploration: the good old-fashioned method. Wander around and start looking, lazybones.
• Using a seed: since seeds generate predetermined worlds, using one whose village, temple, and castle locations are already known will let you find them without any trouble. For more information, check out everything we know about the best Minecraft seeds.
• Using cheats: it’s a little cheap—and somewhat pointless if your goal is to trade—but if cheats are enabled, use the locate Village command (with a capital V). The game will return a set of Cartesian coordinates (X and Y, although it sometimes won’t give you the X coordinate). Then enter teleport yourname X, Y (X and Y are the coordinates you were given; if you don’t have X, you’ll need to experiment) and you’ll arrive at the village.
• This cheat can also be used in the mobile version, although the command for locating a village must be entered in English: /locate village. To use the cheat, you’ll first need to enable cheats in the options menu in the upper-right corner, then type the command into the chat window. After that, use the teleport command as described above (/teleport yourname X,Y) and you’re all set.
• Using Chunkbase: this is the most "legitimate" cheat-like method. First, write down the number corresponding to your seed or the seed you plan to use. Then visit this village finder. Enter the relevant seed number in the "Seed" box, then click Find Villages. The tool will show you the coordinates of inhabited areas. After that, launch the game, create a map—which will let you see your coordinates—and you’re good to go.